« ... this grim weary wilderness of men » : Victorian Townscapes in Poetry and Prose
p. 41-63
Texte intégral
1When I first heard about this conference, I was under the erroneous impression that it was going to be about landscapes. Thomas Hardy immediately sprang to mind :
Throughout the field I find no grain ;
The cruel frost encrusts the cornland1 !
2When I learnt that the topic was urban landscapes, it became more than obvious that a poet of place, so deeply steeped in his native soil as Hardy, would not be a fit candidate. But who was among England’s poets between 1830 and 1930 ?
3In 1892 Arthur Symons wrote that the test of « poetry which professes to be modern » was « its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there, indoors and out »2. No doubt, Modernism had made the city a respectable topic for poetry. It aestheticised urban culture in both its depressing and polite aspects : the teas and conversations, concert-rooms and distant echoes of Chopin and French dandy culture in T.S. Eliot’s « Portrait of a Lady », the anonymous faces in Ezra Pound’s « In a Station of the Metro », the « soot that falls from the chimneys », « yellow smoke » and « sprinkled streets » in Eliot’s « The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock »3. The city had become the prime locus of contemplation – the city as a symbol of human perfection and cultural achievement as opposed to the city as a crowd of strangers, a uniform wasteland drained of meaning and purpose, as in H.D.’s « Cities » from The Sea Garden (1916).
Can we believe – by an effort
comfort our hearts :
it is not waste all this,
not placed here in disgust,
street after street,
each patterned alike,
no grace to lighten
a single house of the hundred
crowded into one garden-space4.
4Given the Modernists’ preoccupation with the city, one is inclined to connect their interest with a second observation common in British cultural criticism : « the sense of the city [... was] never as strong in England as in certain other parts of the world »4. Neither Pound nor Eliot nor H.D. was of British origin. The native poets of the teens and twenties, commonly grouped together as the Georgians, wrote in the pastoral tradition, celebrating the charms and bucolic pleasures of the English countryside and defying the glaring city lights and urban wastelands we associate with the great poetic revolution of 1912. Moreover, in the seventies an important question was raised : how urban was Modernist culture ? And consequently : are there two Modernist literatures – an urban (international) and a rural (British) one ? In his study Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972) Donald Davie declared Hardy a pre-eminent exponent of British Modernist poetry5. Two decades later Mary Ann Gillies expanded the idea and argued that Hardy was the spokesman of « an indigenously English tradition » in Modernist literature6. His poems « show that the familiar landscape of the English countryside was equally and profoundly affected by the doubt and changes of the new century »7. Calling Hardy the British modernist par excellence means challenging Eliot’s idea of Modernist culture as an urban phenomenon.
5At the same time, however, the argument that British poets, both Modernist and anti-Modernist, were particularly impermeable to the city is apt to create the false impression that Modernist (urban) poetry meant a complete breach with nineteenth-century poetic traditions as regards the treatment of the city. A survey of literary histories and Victorian anthologies is apt to strengthen this impression, and our image of the Victorian city with its filthy, congested towns, brick terraces and foul chimneys, is largely due to the writings of social reformers and the social-realist and industrial novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. Still, urban life and landscapes were not exclusively the province of committed prose writers, as a search of Chadwick & Healey’s poetry database confirms. The yield is impressive : 93 poems have « city » as part of their title and more than two thousand have the word in the poem8. Even though the city was not major poets’ first choice of subject matter, it formed part of the Victorian poetic imagination, and it is in the minor poetry and the side currents that we need to look for a tradition of city-writing which points back to Charles Jenner’s pre-Romantic London Eclogues from the mid-eighteenth century, where the poet turns his back on London (« no verdant glade, no gushing rill, / No fountain gushing from the rocky hill ») and decides « no more to seek the vagrant muse / But ev’n go write at home and save my shoes »9, and forwards to Eliot’s exhortation to the contrary in « The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock » : « Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells »10. Two aspects prevail in Victorian poets’ treatment of the city : a) the city as the site of social injustice, depravity and destitution (the socio-ethical view) ; b) the city as opposed to the countryside (the nostalgic, pastoral view). In the following these two aspects will be examined with regard to major currents in Victorian poetry and in the context of representations of the city in both fictional and non-fictional prose.
a) The Socio-Ethical View : Townscapes as Moral Landscapes
6Briggs paraphrases « townscape » as « what can be seen in a city »11 (my italics). To the social writer the visible element (in the sense of « visual », « architectural ») has little importance except in connection with human figures. Victorian townscapes are first and foremost perceived as manscapes and moral landscapes, i.e. as anti-gardens inhabited by toiling, suffering and starving men, women, and children. Characteristically, Alice Meynell’s « In Manchester Square » describes the death of a young, crippled city worker :
The paralytic man has dropped in death
The crossing-sweeper’s brush to which he clung,
One-handed, twisted, dwarfed, scanted of breath,
Although his hair was young12.
7Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s glimpses of townlife are scattered with human bodies – creatures vegetating in deplorable living conditions, unheeded, forgotten corpses or ghostly phantoms :
... children small,
Spilt like blots about the city,
Quay, and street, and palace-wall
[...]
Ragged children with bare feet,
[...]
Ragged children, hungry eyed,
Huddled up out of the coldness
On your doorsteps, side by side,
Till your footman damns their boldness13.
8In his description of a workhouse in 1850, Dickens creates a stark metaphor to convey the worst aspects of Victorian city-life – that of the « dragon, Pauperism, in a very weak and impotent condition ; toothless, fangless, drawing his breath heavily enough, and hardly worth chaining up »14.
9The Victorian city was a place of concern, a breeding ground for epidemic diseases, a dark and frightening concentration of the mob, associated with physical affliction and moral pestilence. It came to signify social injustice, exploitation of the working classes and child labour, destitution, low standards of housing, abominable hygienic conditions, illness, high mortality, squalor, monotony, and depravity. William Larminie’s poem « London », in Fand and Other Poems, is typical of the Victorian poet’s distrust of the city. Even though the great industrial centres differed enormously in aspect, as historians and social writers have amply demonstrated, to the poet they were all the same :
Let not the Londoner chancing to read
Deem that I purpose him evil
In choosing his city for type of the world’s great bane !
His city earth’s mightiest, and to me best known :
For the like would I say, some difference granted,
Of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago,
And of such imitations as here we have built us, the nearest we may,
By the banks of the Liffey and Lagan.
Far though I am from thee now,
London, still do I hear
In the chambers of memory’s shell
The buzz and the hum and the cries,
The surges and sighs of the streets,
And all thy multitudinous movement of men
...15
10As the idea of industry was grafted onto the idea of the city16, Victorian townscapes were commonly perceived in literature as the topography of the poor, marked by furnaces and smoking chimneys, dark alleys, crowded courts, brothels and prisons, sooted black pavements, wheels spinning all day long. Everywhere lingered the victims of industrial progress. Not surprisingly, the Victorian city had more critics than apologists, both inside and outside the country17. Henry Colman, for example, described the effects of industrialisation in a manner recalling Browning’s poetry : « Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature, lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society »18. The rapid expansion of the wool towns, coal towns and metal centres, the proliferation of factory buildings and the spatial density of housing areas19 were not so much noted for their visual impact, as they meant drastic social and economic differences, dividing the nation into « two nations », as Disraeli put it : « Two nations ; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy […] THE RICH AND THE POOR »20. The spatial division between the two – « as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets »21 – is confirmed in Friedrich Engels’s depictions of English cities in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 : « the working-class districts and the middle-class districts are quite distinct »22. In his travel commentaries, Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar observation about Manchester : « From this filthy sewer pure gold flows »23, and in The Doom of a City (1857), James Thomson, the most prolific Victorian poet of the city24, imagines a city marked by both evil and power :
Chief social laws seem strictly framed to secure
That one be corruptingly rich, another bitterly poor,
And another just starving to death ; thy fanes and mansions proud
Are beleaguered with filthy hovels wherein poor wretches crowd.
25
11Disraeli’s idea of two nations is equally strong in the poetry of Barrett Browning, the best-known poet-advocate of the rights of the poor. Wealth and technological progress, most powerfully symbolised by the railway, are continually shown as being gained at the cost of the labouring classes, whose average life expectancy was 17 years, according to the report of a sanitary inspector in 184726. Recalling Dickens’s notion of the railway as « the life’s blood » and « the triumphant monster, Death »27, she likens the rail-cars to white horses pulling a dead-cart :
The curse of gold upon the land
The lack of bread enforces ;
The rail-cars snort from strand to strand,
Like more of Death’s white horses28 !
12Most commonly, the city in Victorian literature is far from being a polite place or a place of civic dignity29, victorious progress and « mechanical genius »30, as the spokesmen of urban and technological progress claimed31. In a poem entitled « Mother and Son », William Morris speaks of the « weary waste of the town »32, Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855-91) of « this grim weary wilderness of men » (« In the City, I »), John Ruskin of « the great foul city of London »33; Larminie perceives London as sunken in a vast « ugliness-ocean », and Dickens repeatedly refers to the « wide wilderness of London » (Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son34) and to its « melancholy madness » (Hard Times35). Where the city is beheld with the eye, it yields a dreary impression of monotony and anonymity, as Dickens’s famous description of Coketown (Preston) in Hard Times suggests :
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it ; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next36.
13Victorian urban landscapes are often obscure landscapes, darkened by fog or towering factories37. Dark shapes, black clouds, pale phantoms, and smoke often impair visibility in Dickens’s novels38, and Tocqueville’s account of Manchester yields a similar impression of gloom :
These vast structures [huge palaces of industry] keep air and light out of human habitations which they dominate ; they envelope them in perpetual fog. […] A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half-daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this dark, damp labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great cities. The footsteps of a busy crowd, the crunching wheels of machinery, the shriek of steam from boilers, the regular beat of the looms, the heavy rumble of carts, those are the noises from which you can never escape in the sombre half-light of these streets39.
14For a similar reason, panoramic townscapes are rare in Barrett Browning’s poetry, which is most convincing where it brings before our eyes details of dirt and poverty : « black flies that crawl along the ceiling »40, spinning iron-wheels and the rolling dead-cart. For the city is invisible to those wasting away in the dark of the coal-mines and factories. When sight is dimmed, hearing becomes prominent, as in Tocqueville’s description. In Barrett Browning’s poems the noises of industry (the rolling dead-cart, the snorting railway, the droning iron-wheels41) commonly mingle with the sounds of misery : sobbing and moaning children, weeping men, shrieking women :
The plague runs festering through the town,
And never a bell is tolling,
And corpses, jostled ’neath the moon,
Nod to the dead-cart’s rolling.
The young child calleth for the cup,
The strong man brings it weeping ;
The mother from her babe looks up,
And shrieks away its sleeping.
Be pitiful, O God42!
15In Ernest James Myers’s (1844-1921) « To a Dweller in a Great City » there is a similar « awful undersong » heard throughout the city.
Grim sounds unnumbered blending
To load the blackened air,
Unresting and unending.
A chorus of despair
…43
16The social conscience of these poets bears strong similarity with the purpose of the industrial novel, namely « to incite thought and help mould attitudes to burning problems »44. Yet, especially the calm flow of Barrett Browning’s poetry, its metrical regularity, unforced rhymes and chiming sounds have a soothing effect on the reader, which is incompatible with the stark impact of her images : « The curse of gold upon the land / The lack of bread enforces ; The rail-cars snort from strand to strand / Like more of Death’s white horses ! » Even though the heavy beat is reminiscent of a tolling bell, the hammering of a piston, or a marche funèbre, the unvaried rhymes and balanced cadences maintained throughout the poem tend to dull the sensory intensity of her imagery. To the modern reader, Barrett Browning’s voice may be a hint too confident, too poised and controlled given the enormous wrongs and afflictions being addressed. Her pity, however, is characteristic of the Victorian sentiment, overstating the image of the toiling saint, the honest pauper, the tender-hearted and worthy prisoner who passes his « dismal time » with fancies and « dreams of distant spheres »45. An extreme example of such humanitarian sentimentalism is Henry Ellison’s (1811-90) « A City, at Sunset », which goes so far as to glorify the good in poverty. As the poet watches the urban skyline being transformed by the golden light, he imagines a holy time of domestic bliss and content. The poor, joined in « fair humanity », make their humble offerings to God :
Yes, that great city, with its thousand homes
And hearths, and gentle household fires, is
A goodly altar, such as well becomes
The God invoked – an altar built to His
Religion, and the fair Humanities
Of social Life, which there join hands and kiss !
17The image is grossly at odds with the results of a nation-wide religious census carried out in 1851, according to which church-going was lowest in the industrial areas. The masses of the working population were, as Lord Shaftesbury put it, « cut off from hope of salvation »46.
18Drawing on the wretched lives of the working classes and pleading for social pity, as Barrett Browning does in her poetry, or calling for social reforms and improved labour conditions, as William Morris does in his late collection of poems The Pilgrims of Hope47, neither poet offers an account of the workers’ misery half as repulsive as the reports of sanitary and nuisance inspectors48 or as Engels’s description of the « Slums in Manchester »49. Here are two extracts : the first describes covered passages in Manchester, the second the river Irk – a microlandscape in the city, so to speak :
On reaching them [courts accessible via covered passages from Long Millgate] one meets with a degree of dirt and revolting filth, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere. The worst courts are those leading down to the Irk, which contain unquestionably the most dreadful dwellings I have ever seen. In one of these courts, just at the entrance where the covered passage ends, there is a privy without a door. This privy is so dirty that the inhabitants of the court can only enter or leave the court if they are prepared to wade through puddles of stale urine and excrement. Anyone who wishes to confirm this description should go to the first court on the bank of the Irk above Ducie Bridge. Several tanneries are situated on the bank of the river and they fill the neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. [...]
At the bottom the Irk flows, or rather, stagnates. It is a narrow, coal-black, stinking river full of filth and rubbish which it deposits on the more low-lying right bank. In dry weather this bank presents the spectacle of a series of the most revolting blackish-green puddles of slime from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and create a stench which is unbearable even to those standing on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the level of the water. Moreover, the flow of the river is continually interrupted by numerous high weirs, behind which large quantities of slime and refuse collect and putrefy50.
19So far, so foul. What strikes the reader about this text is the sheer richness of Engels’s olfactory register. Stench, it seems, more than visual squalor, is the test of authenticity in Victorian depictions of urban desolation. In his lecture Unhealthiness of London, and the Necessity of Remedial Measures (1847), Hector Gavin speaks of « stagnant putrid ditches, [...] emitting from its untrapped sewers, its thousands of filthy streets, and myriads of disgusting nuisances, noisome smells and volatile poisons, as fatal as arsenic ... »51. Dickens’s townscapes are filled with ill smells ; Tocqueville draws our attention to the « fetid, muddy waters » of Manchester52; John Ruskin describes London as « rattling, growling, smoking, stinking – a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore – a cricket ground without the turf, a huge billiard table without the cloth, and with pockets deep as the bottomless pit »53. Yet, while stench is so prominent in both prose fiction and reports on urban expansion, it is largely absent from the poetry of the period, even from socially committed poetry. Poems abound in unpleasant visual impressions, and there is a great deal of noise going on : « the voice of the throng » and the « clatter of wheels »54, to which the individual is continuously exposed : « All round about me is the City’s noise, – / The pitiless clamor [sic !] of the London street »55. But, in contrast to Jenner’s mid-eighteenth-century depiction of the outskirts of London with its « burning rows of fetid bricks » and « nauseous dunghills swell[ing] in mould’ring heaps »56, there are very few allusions to offensive odours in Victorian city poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s « On My Joyful Departure from the Same City » is a rare exception. The reference, however, is to Germany, not Britain :
As I am a Rhymer,
And now at least a merry one,
Mr Mumm’s Rudesheimer
And the church of St. Geryon
Are the two things alone
That deserve to be known
In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne (1828).
20Interestingly enough, even Eliot’s « Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock » does not carry a single unpleasant olfactory sensation, despite its bleak visual images of soot, pool, drains, and fog. All we smell is « a toast and tea », « cakes » and « marmalade »57, « the perfume from a dress »58, the smoke of pipes59, the lilac in « Portrait of a Lady »60 and the hyacinths in « The Burial of the Dead », the first part of The Waste Land61. There is not a single negative association with either taste or smelling. Even the reference to waste thrown into the Thames in part 3 of The Waste Land, « The Fire Sermon », causes no offence to the nose : « The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends / Or the testimony of summer nights »62.
21Let us return to Victorian wastescapes. Where poets did not address social wrongs, there seemed to be little incentive to deal with the city. As Briggs notes : « Most artists ignored it or tried their best to ignore it, describing it in their letters but leaving it out of their novels [sic !] and poems »63. The opening of Morris’s Earthly Paradise is indicative of this escapist tendency and constitutes a prime example of the second aspect of the city suggested at the outset of my paper – the nostalgic or pastoral view :
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town ;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green ;
.64
b) The Nostalgic Attitude
22England’s transformation from a predominantly rural to an urban civilisation in the nineteenth century provoked a wide range of emotional reactions : bewilderment at the rapid change, protest, and atavism. An entry in Stephen Blackpool’s diary confirms the sheer stupefaction with which Victorians noticed the progressive urbanisation of the country : « Villages have grown into large towns, and country places where there was nothing but fields are now covered with streets, and villages and large factories and workshops everywhere »65. In his lectures on art and architecture, Morris expresses a sterner note of protest against the increasing ugliness and the destruction of ancient monuments caused by the Victorians’ rage for building. There is little in the countryside to soothe the wanderer, he argues, stressing – as so often in his lectures – the ethical and psychological importance of beauty :
... where now as we turn to the corner of the road or crown the hill’s brow we can see first the inevitable blue slate roof, and then the blotched mud-coloured stucco, or ill-built wall of ill-made bricks of the new buildings ; then as we come nearer, and see the arid and pretentious little gardens, and cast-iron horrors of railings, and miseries of squalid outhouses breaking through the sweet meadows and abundant hedge-rows of our old quiet hamlet, do not our hearts sink within us, and are we not troubled with a perplexity not altogether selfish, when we think what a little bit of carelessness it takes to destroy a world of pleasure and delight, which now whatever happens can never be recovered66 ?
23Concerned with the preservation of ancient buildings, Morris speaks of the « vulgarisation of Oxford » in a letter to the Daily News dated 20 november 1885 :
I wish to ask if it is too late to appeal to the mercy of the « dons » to spare the few specimens of ancient town architecture which they have not yet had time to destroy […] Oxford « culture », cynically contemptuous of the knowledge which it does not know, and steeped to the lips in the commercialism of the day, has made a clean sweep of most of them [the architectural treasures once abundant in Oxford […]. London, Manchester, Birmingham, or perhaps a rising city of Australia would be a fitter place for the experiment, which it seems to me is too rough a one for Oxford67.
24That Morris should consider Manchester or Australia fit places for architectural experiment shows a great deal about the reputation of both England’s industrial centres and its colonies. To the opponents of modern urbanisation, the city signified a lapse into darkness and gross brutality, into the black and barbaric Other, recalling « the painted face of a savage »68. Since the « hurry of Modern Civilisation »69 could be neither stopped nor retarded, protest commonly mingled with a sense of loss and nostalgia – the strongest of feelings among those poets who, in the manner of their Romantic predecessors, continued to compare the city with the country.
25Following the pastoral tradition of contrasting the innocent charms of rustic life with the corruption of the city – a prime example being the following lines from Thomson’s Autumn : « This is the life which those who fret in guilt / And guilty cities never knew – the life / Led by primeval ages uncorrupt »70 –, poets frequently used aspects of urban life as a frame within which they developed their vision of a more benevolent destiny. Tennyson’s « The City Child », one of his child-songs, is an admirably innocent dream of blossoming gardens indulged by one who is deprived of nature :
Dainty little maiden, whither would you wander ?
Whither from this pretty home, the home where mother dwells ?
« Far and far away », said the dainty little maiden,
« All among the gardens, auriculas, anemones,
Roses and lilies and Canterbury-bells. »71
26Even though this child lives in a « pretty home », the city is a place to be left behind. It is a place fit for dreaming, but not for dwelling in. The city with its « dusty street[s] » (Lefroy, « In the City, I »), « dim windows », « dingy, garret pane[s] », « smoky sills »72, « dull and murky air », « thick, close streets and alleys » (Westwood, « A City Lyric ») and « heaped-up houses » (Westwood, « The Grave in the City ») is experienced by poets as a locus of expulsion and alienation, apt to trigger their longing for a natural topography that was partly the result of the poetic heritage of the Romantics, partly the product of a new botanic interest in nature – hence the specifying of flowers in Tennyson’s poem.
27This bias against the city had an important effect on the sociogeographical development of towns. Being centres of industrial production, they were avoided by those who could afford to settle in the outskirts. Briggs calls this phenomenon the « exodus of the successful » : « Towns were places where men made a livelihood : country houses were places where people lived. Man made the town : God made the Country »73. Against this background we may read Robert Williams Buchanan’s (1841-1901) « Spring Song in the City » : « Who remains in London, / In the streets with me, / Now that Spring is blowing / Warm winds from the sea », the poet asks at the beginning, and then goes on to celebrate the « daisied leas » and « English meadows », the wild rose-trees, singing brooklet and nightingale’s song – stock images of Romantic poetry. The closing stanza is emblematic of the Victorian nature poet’s rejection of the city in favour of a world hilariously dancing and rejoicing, as both the trochaic, leaping movement and the marked caesuras in the following lines suggest :
Oh, to be a-roaming
In an English dell!
Every nook is wealthy,
All the world looks well,
Tinted soft the Heavens glow,
Over Earth and Ocean,
Brooks flow, breezes blow,
All is light and motion !
28The city is rarely addressed without being unfavourably compared to the country, even in a humorously didactic poem such as Sara Coleridge’s (1802-52) « Latin lesson » :
A Town is called oppidum, urbs is a city.
And rus is the country, so fresh and so pretty ;
A hill is called collis, and mons is a mountain,
And vallis a valley, and fons is a fountain.
29Often the city is described as a gloomy, sunless, desecrated, and faithless place, with the ruling classes mocking God, whose abode is with the humble labourers in the countryside (e.g. Lefroy, « In the City, I »). City landscapes are most tolerable where the architecture has not wholly banned nature. When in Arthur Christopher Benson’s (1862-1925) « Spring in the City » the leaves in the « smoky garden and square » turn green and the sycamore and elm « Break in delicate bloom », the passing crowd is seized with idle dreams and « childish hopes ». In the same manner Eliza Cook (1812-89) invites her readers to go and look « into the City’s face ». What they see is a mass of flowers beckoning from the humblest hovels to the mansions of the rich :
From palace halls to cellar floors,
In broad highway, and narrow street ;
From beggars’ dens to princes’ doors,
Go look and note what ye shall see.
[...]
Ah ! gloomy are the Winter days
That close around the traffic mart :
And short-lived are the Summer rays
That fall upon the City’s heart.
Yet dear, Old Nature, fresh and fair,
Has worshippers for ever true,
For ever fond ; and even there
We see her sweet smile peeping through74.
30Myrtle, hyacinths, geraniums and rosebud nurslings greet the poet as she walks through the city :
A pleasant sight it is to see
The spirit of Creation haunt
The City paths in some old tree,
Where butterflies and rooks may flaunt.
Though Toil and Dust may hem us round,
And drink the freshness of our Life ;
Some primal trace will yet be found
Some olive-branches in the strife75.
31Poetry itself is often conceived of as a vestige of such primeval harmonies, echoing both the « spirit of Creation » and the efforts of hobby-gardeners who do not grow weary of cultivating beauty in the midst of man-made urban chaos.
32The city is agreeable only where it conceals or makes us forget its being a city. Not surprisingly, the sleeping city is a favourite topos among Victorian poets, giving them yet another chance to indulge the pleasures, leisure and slow pace of rural life. Buchanan’s « The City Asleep », written in eight ballad stanzas, is a post-Romantic celebration of urban unrest « conquer’d by God’s breath », and Francis William Bourdillon (1852-1921) chooses the form of the Italian sonnet for his poem « A Sleeping City », which enhances the sense of order and tranquillity he associates with God’s creation – nature :
The silence of a sleeping city fills
The hungering soul more than the jar and feud
And noonday noises of the multitude.
It hath a mystic kinship with the hills,
With torrents thundering in lonely ghylls,
With shoreless seas, and awful solitude
Of deserts, where are giant statues hewed
By hands unknown for old despotic wills.
Man’s soul is vaster than man’s senses. Lo,
Where eye and ear find nothing, avenues
More secret open ; and by ways untrod
The stealing thoughts come, silent as the flow
Of inland tides, and tranquilly infuse
Our muddy shallows with fresh streams from God.
33To the nature poet, the city carries connotations of bondage and deprivation, of decline and death. It bars the soul from its holy communion with God and cuts off the source of inspiration. Transcendental visions of the Romantic Sublime are not to be enjoyed in the busy, swarming life of the city. The poets’ dilemma persists throughout Victorian pastoralism, for they either have to betray their spiritual ancestry or give the lie to their environment. The result is an excessive concern with death. Thus William Cox Bennett (1820-95), like Eliza Cook, points to the incompatibility of nature and cityscapes in « Flowers in the City », but, unlike her, adds a sterner note of inescapable death, which awaits both God’s and man’s creation :
Withered ! ah, and we too wither
In these dim and leafless streets,
Where no glimpse of beauty meets
Our dulled hearts ; oh, still come hither,
Bringing from your green retreats
Sense of quiet to these streets76 !
34To whom could the idea of man languishing in a hostile world be more attractive than to a pessimist like Thomas Hardy. His « Dream of a City Shopwoman » dated 1866 combines the woman’s longing for a comrade with profound nostalgia for an earthly paradise where nature replaces the works of civilisation :
Our clock should be the closing flowers,
Our sprinkle-bath the passing showers,
Our church the alleyed willow bowers,
The truth our theme...77
35The city has no landscape in Hardy. It is the outer sign of profound existential solitude, a bleak destiny against which men and women are powerless. Their bodies are marked by symptoms of physical and emotional emaciation : impotence, pallor and oblivion. Where dreams unfold, they are immediately rejected as idle (« But all is dream ! ») and only the prospect of death can liberate the soul from its urban fetters :
O God, that creatures framed to feel
A yearning nature’s strong appeal
Should writhe on this eternal wheel
In rayless grime ;
And vainly note, with wan regret,
Each star of early promise set ;
Till Death relieves, and they forget
Their one Life’s time78 !
36Man is chained to an « eternal wheel », which signifies both his exposure to a pitiless God and the incessant motion of machines that slowly ruin men’s lives.
37Hardy’s poem leads me back to the human figure in the city, now in connection with pastoralism rather than moralism. Hardy, Westwood, and Cook either give voice to the poor, underprivileged and uprooted or assume the role of spokesman or – woman, suggesting a privileged insight into the inner lives of their protagonists – a poet’s insight informed with aesthetic conventions rather than the kind of first-hand experience underlying the broadsheet ballads and folk-songs of the period, e.g. « The Oldham Weaver », which was popular in Lancashire from about 1820 onwards. Gaskell transcribed the song in Mary Barton (1848) : « Oi’m a poor cotton-weyver, as money a one knoowas, / Oi’ve nowt for t’ yeat, and oi’ve woorn eawt my clooas… »79. In the light of Dickens’s or George Eliot’s depictions of industrial labourers and paupers in workhouses80, many of Westwood’s and Cook’s pleading, wistful figures carry an untimely Wordsworthian ring about them. Exiles in a hostile world and longing for the lost harmonies of a primordial paradise, these imaginary figures are mouthpieces of the poets’ own nostalgia, while two thousand paupers, ill-fed and dressed in rags, lunatics and cripples crowd Dickens’s workhouse – an urban miniature townscape with squalid yards, wards and « kennels ». Dickens’s poor labourers are past longing, past dreaming and past rebelling. The kind of person he portrays is the pathological depressive type, too worn and exhausted even to utter a word :
A sullen or lethargic indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again...81
38Health reports, too, were stressing « the total abstraction of every moral and intellectual stimulus » from the paupers’ wretched lives82. In the poets’ eye, common human nature, embodied by city workers, beggars, and paupers, was still conceived of as the bearer of fair humanity. The noble pauper became the Victorian counterpart of the noble savage in Romantic poetry. Westwood’s « City Labourer », for example, fancies a remote garden paradise with fountains and birdsong. What sustains him while he « toil[s] with sweat of brow » is the very dream of a better world. Notions of comfort, blessing, strength and « sweet solace » are blatantly incongruous with the mental and physical condition of the poor, and the soliloquy of the worker who is tormented by evil Man but loved by good God and, knowing this, is prepared to accept all hardships, reads like a slap in the face of social reformers :
Do not pity me, my brother,
God’s dear love to me hath given
Comfort mid the strife and turmoil,
And some blessings under heaven.
In the flesh I’m cloud-encompassed.
Through the gloom my footsteps stray,
But I send my thoughts to wander,
And my fancies far away,
And they bring me strength for trial,
And sweet solace day by day83.
39In her sympathetic « Song of the City Artisan » Cook, too, uses the artisan’s longing as a pretext for celebrating nature. Her artisan stands in complete opposition to James Phillips Kay’s report on « The Manchester Cotton Workers », which depicts the artisan as a barely human creature, totally deficient in energy, erudition and finer sentiments :
Having been subjected to the prolonged labour of an animal – his physical energy wasted – his mind in supine inaction – the artizan has neither moral dignity nor intellectual nor organic strength to resist the seductions of appetite. His wife and children, too frequently subjected to the same process, are unable to cheer his remaining moments of leisure. […] Himself impotent of all the distinguishing aims of his species, he sinks into sensual sloth, or revels in more degrading licentiousness84.
40Note the author’s emphasis on women’s failure to provide a cheerful home for the men and children, which is at issue in many poems of the period, most prominently in John Critchley Prince’s (1808-66) « Lines Respectfully Inscribed to the Virtuous and Patriotic Wives and Mothers of England ». Women are flattered as « angelic band », « beings, kindred to divine », « forms of love and grace », and : « Spirits of pity, you were ever prone / To make another’s sorrows all your own, / And with a feeling, sacred and sincere, / To soothe and strengthen, sympathise and cheer! » The poor, obviously, failed in these tasks.
41While drawing in her poem about the city worker the reader’s attention to the artisan’s physical exhaustion and symptoms of a disease also described in Kay’s report (loss of weight, paleness, depression), Cook turns her artisan into a Romantic would-be visionary, who has both a superb intellectual and emotional control over himself and, like most labourers speaking in Victorian dramatic monologues, a remarkable command of language. He is a proud man and does not deplore his fate. He does not envy his master’s affluence nor mind being his slave. But he asks for « the mountain gale, / The dewy turf, and open sky » and, naively imagining a countryside of which he has only second-hand knowledge, prays to work under the sun and in the open air, even if it should mean double his present load of toil:
I read of high and grassy hills,
Of balmy dells and tangled woods ;
Of lily-cups where dew distils,
Of hawthorns where the ringdove broods.
I hear of bright and perfumed flowers,
That spring to kiss the wanderer’s feet;
Of forests where the young fawn cowers,
Of streamlets rippling, cool and sweet.
They tell of waving fields of grain,
Of purple fruit and shining leaves ;
Of scattered seed and laden wain,
Of furrowed glebe and rustling sheaves.
[...]
Give me a spade to delve the soil
From early dawn to closing night ;
The plough, the flail, or any toil
That will not shut me from the light85.
42If Cook’s city worker is not exactly a poet, he is at least a worthy reader with Wordsworthian instincts, for his knowledge of nature ultimately derives from poetry, as he himself admits : « Bards sing its glory – but to me / It is a sealed and hidden book ».
43Cook’s artisan would not have been deluded by Romantic dreams had he read the « Men Who Are Eaten » from Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, a disillusioning depiction of the life of the farm labourer, whose psychology resembles that of Dickens’s pauper :
As we pushed through the crowd, I was struck with the wan, haggard look of all faces ; their lack-lustre eyes and drooping lips, stooping shoulders, heavy, dragging steps, gave them a crushed, dogged air, which was infinitely painful, and bespoke a grade of misery more habitual and degrading than that of the excitable and passionate artisan86.
44Agricultural life hardly corresponded to the idylls in terms of which pastoral poets imagined it. Disraeli’s description of the town of Marney, « a metropolis of agricultural labour »87, from 1845 contrasts the pretty landscape that presents itself to the traveller against the dingy, damp hovels and sombre, ill-constructed cottages which he considered the source of typhus, cholera, malaria, fever and consumption88 : « Beautiful illusion ! For behind that laughing landscape, penury and disease fed upon the vitals of a miserable population »89. Again Disraeli’s text reeks with fetid humidity and nuisance : a putrid roof of thatch, decaying vegetable matter, and the obligatory dunghill :
These hovels were in many instances not provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police ; contiguous to every door might be observed the dungheap on which every kind of filth was accumulated, for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that, when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dunghills90.
45What conclusion are we to draw from these contradictory representations of the city in poetry and prose fiction or non-fictional reports ?
Conclusion
46Victorian townscapes are dreary urban landscapes in which the changes caused by the Industrial Revolution and its negative effects on the population are foregrounded. Whether the dominant impression is horror, disgust, or protest, it commonly reflects an outsider’s impression – that of a traveller, a health inspector or social critic. To this, poets added a wide range of emotional responses : pity, guilt, hope, and longing, often at the expense of a realistic picture of the city and the fate of its inhabitants. In fact, the Victorian poets’ antipathy to urban landscapes needs to be seen as a complex phenomenon involving such discrepancies as that between Victorian poetic discourse and subject matter, between formal conventions and social imbalance, between mellifluous rhymes and the multiple disruptions of people’s lives, between lofty ideals and oppressed human nature, between poetic order and architectural chaos.
47Hence, the chief impression of townlife from Victorian poetry is neither descriptive nor aesthetic, but moral, social, psychological, and symbolic.
48Victorian city poetry attempted to bring the ugly aspects of the city within the framework of an ideal of order, whether in the form of a redemptive, providential paradigm, or in the form of pastoral contrast. The city provided the opposite of beauty and truth, a test of man’s moral strength, the cross that leads towards salvation. Therein lies the weakness of Victorian city poetry – as a realistic account of city-life – and its strength – as an antagonist to the glorification of machines and the mechanisation of culture, triumphantly heralded by Carlyle in 1829 :
Thus does the Genius of Mechanism stand by to help us in all difficulties and emergencies, and with his iron back bears all our burdens. […] Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions – for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character91.
49Victorian city poetry defies the Genius of Mechanism, emphasising the value of the individual and its creative and spiritual powers, variously emphasised by the sceptics and critics of mercantile economy like Ruskin92, by the critics of the exploitation of the individual’s talents by capitalist industry like Morris93, by the critics of machinery as an end in itself like Matthew Arnold94, and by the advocates of individual liberty like John Stuart Mill95. Paupers, suffering children and humble workers could easily be integrated into the sentimental, Romantic, moral and pastoral tones predominating in the complex corpus of Victorian poetry. Moreover, Victorian urban landscapes are human landscapes, and the destiny of the individual appealed to a profoundly anthropocentric spirit, whether indebted to Christian ethics or to the Romantic belief in the worth of the individual.
50The poems discussed are sufficient proof that the city as such was not a Modernist novelty. Modernism did not invent the city, but its urban landscapes mark a significant shift from the margin to the centre. Accounts of urban growth and development in the nineteenth century may help to define Victorian poets’ angle on the city : « Sprawling expansion at the outskirts was accompanied by a decline in the population of the central parts of the city and by a redrawing of social boundaries in the huge areas between the centre and the periphery »96. Dealing with the social and economic margins of townlife, Victorian city poetry, whether committed or escapist, was a poetry of the « periphery » in a transferred sense97 but not a poetry of the periphery in a geographical understanding. Modernist city poetry did away with this paradox. The crowds and anonymous uniformity of city streets, the unrest and spatial density, the ugliness of buildings, the disgust and alienation common in Victorian urban landscapes are still there, but the poet’s lonely perception, the sense of isolation, despair and fragmentation become the very centre of a new creative force : instead of pity and tears, the triumph of loneliness and intellectual distance ; instead of subjective feeling, the objective formula. H.D., Eliot, and Pound placed their observations about the city at the centre, Barrett Browning, Buchanan, Cook, and Westwood located theirs at the margins of modern civilisation, avoiding or rejecting rather than confronting the bustle and gas and stirring of the city.
Cet article est dédié aux représentations du paysage urbain dans la poésie victorienne et les compare aux images données de la ville dans la prose littéraire et non-littéraire de l’époque. Selon les inspecteurs de l’hygiène, les critiques sociaux et les voyageurs étrangers, les paysages urbains de l’époque victorienne sont des paysages mornes, profondément marqués par les changements dus à la révolution industrielle, dont l’influence négative sur la population est mise au premier plan. Les poètes enrichissent le tableau avec une multitude de réponses émotionnelles : des sentiments de pitié, de culpabilité, d’espoir et de nostalgie s’imposent souvent au détriment d’une image plus réaliste de la ville et du destin de ses habitants. L’impression de la ville donnée par la poésie victorienne n’est donc ni descriptive ni esthétique, mais plutôt morale, sociale, psychologique et symbolique. Il y a deux aspects qui dominent : a) la ville en tant que lieu d’injustice sociale, de dépravation et d’indigence (dans une perspective socio-éthique) ; b) la ville par opposition à la campagne (dans une perspective nostalgique et pastorale). Tout en soulignant la notion de l’imperméabilité à la ville qui caractérise la poésie victorienne, les poèmes étudiés suggèrent également que la ville en tant que telle n’est pas une invention du modernisme. Toujours est-il qu’à l’époque moderniste, la ville connaît un passage des marges au centre de l’intérêt, une transition de l’aliénation déplorée par le poète à sa perception solitaire, à son isolement et à son désespoir – autant de sources d’une force créatrice nouvelle.
Notes de bas de page
1 Thomas Hardy, « Winter in Durnover Field », in T.H., Selected Poems, ed. by David Wright, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1978, p. 217.
2 Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1968 (1963), p. 76.
3 T.S. Eliot, « The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock », in T.S.E, Poems : 1909-1925, London, Faber & Faber 1925, p. 11.
4 Briggs, op. cit., p. 32.
5 Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, London, Oxford U.P. 1972, p. 3.
6 Mary Ann Gillies, « Thomas Hardy : Modernist Poet », in Modern Languag Quarterly 51 (1990), pp. 535-554, here p. 538.
7 Ibid., p. 540.
8 As for individual cities, the breakdown is equally impressive : London : 797 poems have the name in the poem / 126 have it in the title ; Manchester : 33 / 6 ; Liverpool : 59 / 7 ; Birmingham : 22 / 4.
9 Quoted in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, London, Hogarth 1985, p. 142.
10 Eliot, op. cit., p. 11.
11 Briggs, op. cit., p. 53.
12 Unless otherwise stated, all poems are quoted from the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database, 1993.
13 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, « A Song for the Ragged Schools of London », in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ware, Wordsworth 1994, p. 563.
14 Charles Dickens, « A Walk in a Workhouse », from Household Words (25 May 1850) ; repr. in Christopher Harvie / Graham Martin / Aaron Scharf (eds.), Industrialisation and Culture, London / Basingstoke, Macmillan / Open U.P. 1970, pp. 122-127, here p. 123.
15 William Larminie, « London », in W.L., Fand and Other Poems, London, Hodges, Figgis & Co 1892.
16 See e.g. James Walvin on the development of the factory in English Urban Life : 1776-1851, London et al., Hutchinson 1984, pp. 42-52.
17 See Briggs’s brief collection of travel commentaries, in op. cit., pp. 114-116.
18 Quoted ibid., p. 116.
19 On the expansion of London and changing living conditions see Janet Roebuck’s chapters « Major Changes in the District » and « Some Changes in the People », in J.R., Urban Development in 19th-Century London : Lambeth, Battersea & Wandsworth 1838-88, London / Chichester, Phillimore 1979, pp. 114-150.
20 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil ; or The Two Nations (1845), Oxford, Oxford U.P 1981, p. 67, quoted in A. Susan Williams, The Rich Man and the Diseased Poor in Early Victorian Literature, Atlantic Highlands / NJ, Humanities Press International 1987, p. 3; see Briggs, op. cit., p. 64.
21 Disraeli, ibid.
22 Friedrich Engels, « Slums in Manchester », from The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, partly repr. in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The Portable Victorian Reader, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1976 (1972), pp. 60-67, here p. 60.
23 From Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (1835), transl. by George Lawrence and K.P. Mayer, 1958, repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 40-42, here p. 42.
24 The Doom of a City was followed by The City of Dreadful Night, written between 1870 and 1873. For a closer examination of its symbolic dimension, see R. williams, op. cit., pp. 235-240.
25 Quoted in R. williams, op. cit., p. 237.
26 Unhealthiness of London, quoted in A.S. Williams, op. cit., p. 4.
27 See A.S. williams, op. cit., pp. 162-163.
28 Barret Browning, op. cit., p. 279.
29 As an example of a poem celebrating London, see e.g. P.J. Bailey’s « London », which opens on the poet’s declaration of his love for the city : « I love thee, London ! […] Thou art the greatest thing on the earth’s face / That man hath made ; thou art what man can do ».
30 See e.g. Thomas Carlyle’s euphoric dictum : « Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery », in T.C, « The Mechanical Age », from Signs of the Times (1829), repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 21-25, here pp. 22-23.
31 See e.g. Walter Bagehot, editor of The Economist, on the « sentimental radicalism » of Charles Dickens, quoted in Harvie et al., op. cit., p. 52 ; Isambard Kingdom Bruneil’s memoranda of the Great Western Railway, from Isambard Brunel, The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer (1879), repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 48-51; see also Briggs, op. cit., p. 69.
32 William Morris, « Mother and Son », in Geoffrey Grigson (ed.), A Choice of William Morris’s Verse, London, Faber & Faber 1969, p. 135.
33 Quoted in Briggs, op. cit., p. 75.
34 See R. Williams, op. cit., p. 160.
35 dickens, Hard Times (1854), Harmondsworth, Penguin 1969, chap. 5, p. 65.
36 Ibid., p. 65.
37 See e.g. Walvin (op. cit., p. 46) on the accommodation of the factory workers, who lived within a short walking distance of their place of work : « Many lived, quite literally, within the shadow of the factory ».
38 See R. Williams’s comment on obscurity in Dickens, op. cit., pp. 155-156.
39 Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 41.
40 Barrett Browning, « The Cry of the Children », st. 7, in op. cit., p. 232.
41 Ibid., st. 7, pp. 232-233.
42 Ibid., st. 4, p. 279.
43 Ernest James Myers, « To a Dweller in a Great City », st. 2.
44 David Craig, « Introduction » to Dickens, Hard Times op. cit., pp. 11-36, here p. 14.
45 Barrett Browning, « The Prisoner », in op. cit., p. 335.
46 Quoted in Briggs, op. cit., p. 63. See Roebuck, op. cit., pp. 137-139. See also Dickens’s depiction of Coketown in Hard Times (op. cit., p. 66) : « It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them [the labouring people] the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, ... ».
47 See e.g. William MORRIS, « Mother and Son », in Grigson (ed.) op. cit. As the mother addresses her baby son (« Lo amidst London I lift thee », p. 135), she contemplates the fate of women depending on men : « "Good is a housekeeper’s life,/ So shall I sell my body that I may be matron and wife." / "And I shall endure foul wedlock and bear the children of need" » (p. 138).
48 See A.S. Williams’s chapter « Pearls upon the Dunghill », in op. cit., pp. 1-42.
49 From Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class op. cit., partly repr. in Haight (ed.), op. cit., pp. 60-69.
50 Ibid., pp. 62-63.
51 Quoted in A.S. williams, op. cit., p. 37.
52 Quoted in Harvie et al., op. cit., p. 41.
53 Quoted in Briggs, op. cit., p. 75.
54 Thomas Westwood (1814-1858), « The Grave in the City ».
55 Philip Bourke Marston (1850-1887). See also Marston’s « City Bells ».
56 Quoted in R. Williams, op. cit., p. 142.
57 Eliot, op. cit., pp. 13,16.
58 Ibid., p. 15.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., p. 22.
61 Ibid., pp. 83, 85.
62 Ibid., p. 94.
63 Briggs, op. cit., p. 75.
64 William Morris, « Prologue », in W.M., The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), London et al., Longman / Green 1907, p. 3, ll. 1-6.
65 Quoted in David Craig, « Introduction » to Dickens, Hard Times op. cit., p. 14.
66 William Morris, « The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation », first published in W.M., Hopes and Fears for Art, five lectures delivered in London, Birmingham and Nottingham, 1878-1881; repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 324-336, here p. 324.
67 William Morris, « The Vulgarisation of Oxford », Letter to the Daily News (20 november 1885), repr. in W.M., News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs, ed. by Asa Briggs, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1984 (1962), pp. 82-83, here p. 82.
68 Dickens, Hard Times op. cit., p. 65.
69 Ibid., pp. 325-326.
70 Quoted in R. Williams, op. cit., p. 143; for an examination of Thomson’s use of the city see ibid., pp. 142-143.
71 Alfred Lord Tennyson, « The City Child », st. 1.
72 Eliza Cook, « A City Song », in The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook, London / New York, Frederick Warne [s.a.], pp. 483-484.
73 Briggs, op. cit., p. 72.
74 Cook, op. cit., p. 483, st. 2,4-5.
75 Ibid., p. 484, st. 13-14.
76 William Cox Bennet, « Flowers in the City », st. 5.
77 Thomas Hardy, « Dream of a City Shopwoman », st. 5, in James Gibson (ed.), The Variorum Edition of Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, Macmillan 1985 (1979), p. 609.
78 Ibid., p. 610, st. 8.
79 From Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 101-102.
80 See e.g. Dickens’s « A Walk in a Workhouse » op. cit., or George Eliot’s description of a village workhouse in 1830, from Scenes of Clerical Life, chap. 2, repr. in Haight, op. cit., pp. 77-84.
81 Quoted in Haight, op. cit., p. 88.
82 James Phillips Kay, « The Manchester Cotton Workers », from The Moral and Physical Conduct of the Working Classes employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), repr. in Harvie et al., pp. 113-117, here p. 115.
83 Westwood, « City Labourer », st. 4.
84 Kay, op. cit., pp. 115-116.
85 Cook, « Song of the City Artisan », st. 4-6,11, in op. cit., pp. 275-276.
86 Charles Kingsley, « Men Who Are Eaten », from Alton Locke, repr. in Haight, op. cit., pp. 73-77, here p. 76.
87 Repr. from Disraeli, Sybil op. cit., book II, chap. 3, in Haight, op. cit., pp. 69-73.
88 See reports on the unhealthiness and poor sanitary condition of the labouring population, A.S. Williams, op. cit., pp. 15-42.
89 Disraeli, op. cit., p. 70.
90 Ibid., p. 71.
91 Carlyle, op. cit., p. 24.
92 See e.g. John Ruskin, « The Veins of Wealth », from Unto this Last (1862), partly repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 188-190.
93 E.g. William Morris, « How I Became a Socialist » (1894), repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 191-195.
94 Matthew Arnold, « Culture and Machinery », from Culture and Anarchy (1869), partly repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 173-176.
95 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), partly repr. in Harvie et al., op. cit., pp. 169-172.
96 Briggs, op. cit., p. 27. See also Roebuck on the expansion of London, op. cit., pp. 114-150.
97 Briggs (op. cit., p. 72) for example shows that the outskirts were preferred to the centre of towns.
Auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Les Dieux cachés de la science fiction française et francophone (1950- 2010)
Natacha Vas-Deyres, Patrick Bergeron, Patrick Guay et al. (dir.)
2014
C’était demain : anticiper la science-fiction en France et au Québec (1880-1950)
Patrick Bergeron, Patrick Guay et Natacha Vas-Deyres (dir.)
2018
Ahmadou Kourouma : mémoire vivante de la géopolitique en Afrique
Jean-Fernand Bédia et Jean-Francis Ekoungoun (dir.)
2015
Littérature du moi, autofiction et hétérographie dans la littérature française et en français du xxe et du xxie siècles
Jean-Michel Devésa (dir.)
2015
Rhétorique, poétique et stylistique
(Moyen Âge - Renaissance)
Danièle James-Raoul et Anne Bouscharain (dir.)
2015
